View full sizeKerry Maloney, The Times-PicayuneGreg Meffert, former Mayor Ray Nagin's technology chief, has pleaded guilty to conspiring to deprive citizens of New Orleans of honest services.

Enter Allen Square. He introduced himself as the new technology chief to the City Council on Tuesday, sotto voce. He is clearly proud of his experience -- noting a decade building wireless networks and the last five years using technology to restructure failing companies -- but was careful to avoid any of Meffert's extravagant promises. With little fanfare, he presented a plan to turn around what he described as a decade of technological stagnation.

"Our systems are in real, real crisis," Square said. "Every major city has financial systems they can rely on. We need that and deserve that."

In an interview with The Times-Picayune, Square bluntly said that all of the city's major tech projects have failed.

Meffert's signature crime camera program? It got as many indictments for corrupt management as it did for alleged crimes caught on video, and was recently dropped by Mayor Mitch Landrieu.

Meffert's promise to replace the old mainframe computer system with sleek, cutting-edge servers that would make government spending easier to track? Well, Square found such critical city functions as financial systems and police records still stored on the 1990s mainframe.

View full sizeDavid Hammer, The Times-PicayuneThis New Orleans City Hall typewriter was cited as an example of the anachronistic technology used in city government.

The city's e-mail servers? They have crashed often and lack proper storage and backup, Square said.

The financial tracking system that was introduced about five years ago? "The implementation was horrible and midway through they canceled the project," Square said.

"If we ran a private business the way we run City Hall, we would have been out of business a long time ago," Councilman Jon Johnson said.

Square said the goal is to replace the mainframe financial system with a new Oracle-style database and accounting system by the end of 2011. As the city's new chief financial officer, Norman Foster, recently told the Aviation Board, financial tracking should improve "as we get out of these not-21st-century systems that we have."

A big issue hindering the technology office has been an overreliance on outside contractors to run the show, something Meffert took to a new level with confusing layers of project managers and subcontractors -- and later parlayed into kickbacks. Square said his focus in 2010 and 2011 is to replace contractors whenever possible with in-house staff, keeping outside companies only to perform highly specialized tasks.

The two main tech contractors, TDC and MSF, will remain under contract through June 2011, but Square said their billable work will be reduced by $2 million as daily work is done in-house.

Square said he has four immediate priorities:

To create a customer-service and public help desk called Ask NOLA!, which is budgeted to cost next to nothing this year, but which Square described as "more than 311."

To modernize the city's human resources and finance systems with a two-year transition that will cost $2.5 million in 2010-11.

To keep city departments accountable for performance using a statistics- and map-based tracking system called NOLAStat, scheduled to cost $757,000 this year.

To expand online city services through an E-City Hall initiative expected to cost $325,000.

Square said these technology improvements should have an impact beyond his department.

The city's Safety and Permits Department introduced a $300,000 plan to build a new permit tracking system, so property owners and developers will have a one-stop shop to get information about their permit applications, and city employees can figure out where the bottlenecks are.

And after struggling to handle simple payroll functions with the current system, the upgrade should help the city establish a consolidated human resources department, rather than having departmental employees responsible part-time for personnel and payroll issues.

"It's wire hangers and masking tape," said Courtney Bagneris, the city's assistant chief administrative officer. "We really have to be sure we pay people correctly and pay people timely."

In presenting a four-part plan to bring the city's computer system up to date, Square left the flash to Deputy Mayor Andy Kopplin, who started the City Council presentation by pointing to a dinosaur of a typewriter that he said was used to compile the city's official list of properties it owns. That brought snickers from the council members, who made jokes about slide rules and abacuses.

While Square studiously avoided starting his task with Meffert-esque braggadocio, that didn't stop the City Council from looking to him with a sense of desperation.